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What would be the timeline and return for said crop? I'm not at a point where I can begin a garden and I want to know how many months of stored canned and dried items is reasonable from collapse to first harvest.

All help is appreciated.

EDIT: Thank you everyone with your insightful comments! I have a lot of homework to do but you definitely pointed me in the right direction.

It really depends on timing, as in if you started right now it would take till march to get any possible crop to harvest.

Apples and potatoes have huge returns , calories/acre and per work hour needed. They also store incredibly well, and have long harvest times. Obviously with apples you need a large lead time, but they do very well in the northeast. The right cultivar can be stored for up to 5 months in the right conditions.

Potatoes can be planted April-May and then be harvested, as needed, from June up until late October. They can then be stored for months in a dark place. The best thing about them is you can just leave them in the ground until you need them.

Onions follow the same general ideas as Potatoes, but aren't as easy.

There are many Greens that do well in winter and can be planted in Fall for an early spring harvest. Collard, Kale, Spring Cabbage, sugar-snap peas will all give you an early spring boost.

Tomatoes do well, grow fairly fast and easy provided you have decent calcium, and can avoid blossom end rot and fungus infections. If you have seedlings ready you can plant in late May and have your first fruits in late June. They store poorly without canning supplies. You can get huge returns per acre.

Snap/String Beans grow relatively fast, and can be dried somewhat.

I'd worry more about a long term plan than the time to first harvest. Squash type fruits take a very long time to grow, but store very well.

I'm no expert, it's been years since my classes in agriculture, but I'd say the answer is many different crops, with staggered plantings. There are a couple big hurdles in modern gardening/farming that present huge problems in a post-collapse world.

One of the biggest is seed retention. You'll need to learn how to save viable seeds for future plantings. More importantly, you'll need crops that produce viable seeds. Many of the seeds you can buy at a gardening store are one generation and out. Look up Heirloom varieties of the plants you want to grow, they will allow you to grow future generations.

I'm no expert, it's been years since my classes in agriculture, but I'd say the answer is many different crops, with staggered plantings.

This is very good advice. You don't just want diversified crops (though you want staggered harvests and such too) - you want different varieties of the same crop. Five or six different types of potatoes, maybe, and as many different kinds of squash and tomatoes - that sort of thing. Not only are different strains good for different purposes, but diseases and pests that hit one variety hard might not hit other varieties at all. The Irish potato famine was so destructive because all Ireland planted, essentially, the same variety of potato, which was susceptible to blight.

I'd just like to emphasize that gardening is hard work, and yields are unreliable until you get a good feel for it - an understanding of your personal soil and climate, the best varieties to use, strategies for dealing with diseases and insects and large furry eating machines. If you're not in a position to garden now, aim to be - if you can - but don't assume that once you get your first harvest everything's good from there...

Also, two books that I rather like - in the self-sufficient gardening vein - are "The Resilient Gardener" and "Gardening When It Counts". Both of those books focus on gardening for people who expect to have to rely on gardens. Even if you can't garden now, you can read and plan :)

Nice books. There really is no substitute for experience. I can discuss stats all day, but my mother-in-law can grow in a half an acre more than I could in two.

I suppose I should add that anyone interested in Gardening / subsistence farming can usually find vast amounts of vetted research at universities and colleges that have agricultural departments. An added bonus is that the closer the college is to you the more relevant the information as they tend to do research locally. Also your state Dept of Agriculture usually has good info.

Apples can be upwards of 25,000 pounds an acre. They also make decent animal feed for hogs (less so for other species, obviously). But it's going to take him much longer than a single season for those. Depending on how much he's willing to spend, his trees may be a bit older, and could start producing within about 2-4 years (lower yields at first).

I do recommend orchard trees, of course, but he needs to focus some effort on other crops. Depending on how far north, there are several grains worth considering. Several varieties of wheat and oats, possibly rye. Barley if he prefers it. Corn and soy are also rather high-yielding, but he'd be better off with lower-yielding heirloom varieties.

I had stayed away from the grains topic because I was already into a wall of text, and there is so much to that topic. Grains are a definite boon to a long-term farming situation, can be stored longer than anything else mentioned so far save dried beans, and can also be used to make Alcohol, which is one of the most reliable trade items in history.

One of the main challenges would be weeds. The image most people have of a wheat field of endless stalks of grain-tipped wheat blades would be near impossible to create without pesticides. Clearing out weeds in an acre sized vegetable garden with neat rows is one thing, a field of grass quite another.

What you'd end up with is a mixed bag of various other grasses and pest plants that would be time prohibitive to pull out by hand. Volume would drop dramatically from commercial outputs and it would take a few years to get it down.

Threshing and winnowing by hand is arduous labor, even compared to gardening I'd think it would be taxing on people for the yields. Hard to estimate how much a well tended, protected acre of grain might yield by hand. 10 bushels / 600 pounds of grain? Factor in spoilage and it changes again.

One plus side is that many varieties of wheat, barley, and grains have winter and summer plantings and you can harvest grains in early spring, and again in summer even as far north as Maine.

As for heirloom, I agree, I don't think I'd take the risk of relying on anything but. As you state the yields are low, and so can be the desirability. Hybrid's are created for their hardiness, production, aesthetic, quality and quantity aspects, but aren't typically made to reproduce season to season, and finding out your seeds suck after bloom would be devastating. All the time saving seeds planting wasted.

Edit: One note on Soy. It is a great addition, high yield, good storage, high resistance to disease, versatile in use.

Apples can be made into alcohol, as well. To be honest, beer is kind of a pain in the ass to make from scratch. You have to make sure you understand your water's mineral composition just to know how to kiln your malt, let alone how much bitterness to add to the beer. Then you need to maintain constant temperatures in a kiln for about a day, IIRC. Then you have to mash the grains (constant temperatures for at least an hour). Then you need hops (or some other bittering herb that won't kill you or make you go crazy, but hops are preferred for their anti-microbial properties).

To make cider, you grind apples, then you mush 'em. When you ferment fruit, the quality of the end product depends a lot more depends on the quality and kind of fruit than the process itself, and to be honest, the best cider apples are not good eating apples. Beer is mostly the malting and mashing process, though you aren't going to turn shitty quality barley into the world's best pilsner, no matter how hard you try, and the cultivar of your flavoring/aroma hops are still an important decision.

Threshing and winnowing by hand is arduous labor, even compared to gardening I'd think it would be taxing on people for the yields.

I suspect that this doesn't have to be manual labor, for someone truly interested in doing it. I know there are antique machines used to do this before those functions were put into "combines", and either refurbishing or building a new one isn't out of the question.

Hard to estimate how much a well tended, protected acre of grain might yield by hand. 10 bushels / 600 pounds of grain? Factor in spoilage and it changes again.

I dunno, 10 bushels is on the low end for large-scale, mechanically harvested. And for smaller, more intensively-cultivated fields, you should see a boost there. If you have 1000 acres and animals get in eating 2 or 3 acres, you'll never notice. If you have that same happen to your single acre, you're likely to notice the next morning. I'm thinking that unless you see a drought, you can manage 20-25 bushels even with heirloom varieties (not the first year, maybe starting in on the third or fourth year). I haven't done this myself yet though, and my speculation is worth shit, I know that.

One note on Soy. It is a great addition, high yield, good storage, high resistance to disease, versatile in use.

Personally I'd only ever want soy sauce, no idea if I could make decent stuff. And even that, I wouldn't want much. Many use it for animal feed for the protein content, but I'm starting to wonder if I shouldn't look at other things for that. For poultry, I had been reading up on BSF, but some say it causes the meat and eggs to taste bad if they get too much. Also looking at fabaceae tree crops (siberian pea tree, etc) and maybe even moringa. People definitely should consider soy though... we grow so much of it in the United States because it works.

If you've nothing but hybrid seeds, though, perhaps a long-term saving strategy would be to select the seeds that arise from successful bearing plants and save those for following years or , if plants arise bearing fruit of two or more separate but desirable traits, to save both varieties separately. Were I in a situation where all I had to plant were hybrids, that'd be a chance I'd have to take.

If you are looking to grow something yourself, have enough land, and want to continue to produce long term... Corn, beans, and squash. There are varieties of each that grow well in pretty much any climate the contiguous 48 states has to offer and they naturally compliment each other requiring very little maintenance compared to growing them by themselves or some other crop. Source (I just remembered it but figured I'd show something to back up my claim.) : http://www.reneesgarden.com/articles/3sisters.html

True, I often underestimate how uneducated the avg person may be in subjects like this, but it also depends where you are. In the rural areas, the avg person is much more likely to know what to look for. But making your garden less obvious would definitely help.

But if i am the only one with a garden in an x mile radius, and people are starving, and probably eating eachother, it is still important to protect it.

I'd say get your greens wild, since they are everywhere. Dandelion greens are very nutritious- just eat it before it flowers. Lambsquarters are everywhere, I even see it all the time in nyc, and nettle is good too. Acorns can be soaked and ground into a flour, making them an edible starch/protein. But as for what to garden... go for something calorie heavy, ie starch.

You need enough food to get you from collapse to self sufficiency. Since you don't have any gardening experience I would seriously recommend 3 years worth of stored food. You will have crop failures and your first harvest will probably be weak.

Do some research into what actually grows in your region and plant a variety.

Cereal grains and dry beans. Legumes are great for adding nitrogen to the soil and barley is one of the best cereal grains for northern climates. It doesn't require the nitrogen corn does and has a higher protein content. Both crops will require some milling, but will store for years. Think low moisture content. Potatoes have a decent shelf life as do apple's but you will not have the protein content or carb content of barley or dry beans not to mention their shelf life is a 10th of cereal grains. Barley straw is also useful for bedding and can be used in a ration of ruminants. Barley is also an Excellenct feed.

If you don't like to garden, fruit trees like apples are ideal since they require little matinence and store exceptionally well in root cellers (though will take 5-10 years to really produce). Gourds are also great as well assuming your area isn't prone to blight or cucumber/squash beetles...thing like pumpkin and winter squash storing very well and easy to grow. Potatoes require lots of compost to get good harvests and have to be mounded fairly regularly as well. Can investigate trashcan potatoes or burlap sack potatoes to make it a bit easier as well. Issue w potatoes is they are also subject to disease and insect damage so if you aren't diligent with watching them your crop can go bad fast.

Fruit trees require alot of maintenance actually, that is, if you want them to produce palatable fruit, otherwise they go wild after a year or so w/o pruning. Each spring you need to cut them back to encourage growth, they attract insects like the plague, and often times you can get some meilee ass bugs inside them if you don't use pesticides...

In the Northeast? How far from the ocean? All the transplants will stare at the water and think about fishing, but there's also clams--right there for the digging. Ask an old-timer about when they're good to harvest. Lobster was poor people food on the coast for a long, long time for a reason, also.

It isn't perfect for all meals, but if you know what you're looking for, you can eat really well from the water, or at least supplement your garden or storage.

Seconding the recommendations for potatoes, apples, and the Three Sisters (corn, beans, squash).

The Northeast also has one of the better collections of native fruit and nut producing trees and shrubs in the country so learn to recognize them so you can forage if necessary, and work on improving your own land by switching out useless shade trees like Norway maple for multipurpose trees like oak, hickory, pecan, walnut, etc.

Yes but I looked up your birth certificate and it definitely does not say "SuperSumoYakuza was born to chastise a dummy world into intelligent thought". Seeing as how you elected this upon yourself, you might as well deal with the butthurt kickback.